hey guys i really need your help im trying to start digital painting srtaight from tablet but i still find it hard to do , even with a good size intuos 4 tablet.

so i was wondering if you guys could give me any pointers or tips. most of my work is either traditional scanned in or done straight on tablet but only for cg images of celebrities but when it comes to OC's or just anything else i cant seem to draw it right on tablet 

so any pointers would be appreciated   

A few things I can recommend it practice, of course. A number of artists can tell you going to pencil to tablet looses precision right off the bat but you can gain that back with practice.

Also you can start your image large in pixel area. This way you can zoom in to get finer lines and when you zoom out your lines look smoother.

 What programs are you using?

I've been working digitally for about 5 years now, and I still find that drawing on a tablet is completely different than drawing on paper. I wonder if there's a psychological element to it -- perhaps knowing that I can "undo" makes me less careful about initial line quality. I've given up on trying to reproduce the experience, and save drawing for pencil and paper. On the tablet I find I do best with big fat marks to roughly establish forms, like how one typically roughs in forms for a painting, then refining over time.

But I think surface also plays a role. The way the stylus slides across the tablet is very different than pencil on paper. Once in a while, I'll tape paper over my tablet, just to provide a bit more resistance.

That's pretty interesting Smolin. I have found the transition between mediums somewhat advancing, traditional art speaking, in that it has made my work more confident, especially when it comes to line work and colour aplication.

Kazuma: I have been painting digitally for about 6 months or so and I find the tablet to be very expedient, especially for adding colour. The first few paintings I did I simply colour picked from reference pictures taken from the internet. But, now I prefer to mess with different colours from the colour chart like I would have if I was painting traditionally. A sort of 'dip in and see' approach.

I think it's important to get over any snobbery that so often creeps into art too. For example, feeling like you are somehow cheating if you trace an image, or overlay a textured picture onto your art. Use these and other methods in your work. It will be helpful with getting to grips with the tablet at the very least to follow some underlying structures.

There is another advantage that I find comes from working digitally and that is it's very easy to try out lots of ideas without loosing the rest of your work. After all, you're working with ones and zeros, so the process is clean and precise when it comes to trying out colours or editing your lines. That's my thinking anyway! Hope it was helpful.

Domtopia:

I think it's important to get over any snobbery that so often creeps into art too. For example, feeling like you are somehow cheating if you trace an image

If you trace and claim it as your own it is cheating. Just tracing, though, is like using a lightbox to get the base of the image you want which can be very helpful.

Domtopia:

If you trace and claim it as your own it is cheating. Just tracing, though, is like using a lightbox to get the base of the image you want which can be very helpful.

NO...! I consider this as a sport and there are certain things you do not do in a sport. The same reason why you do not run marathon on a bicycle.

Domtopia:

If you trace and claim it as your own it is cheating. Just tracing, though, is like using a lightbox to get the base of the image you want which can be very helpful.

I don't see anything wrong with that as such, I trace my own drawings though.

Tracing someone else's work seems like plagiarism, nor is it particularly helpful in figuring out anything at all: the lines that flowed naturally and gracefully from the original artist's hand inevitably wither and die as one becomes enslaved to exactly reproducing each little nuance.

As for tracing my own work, I've traced off sketches that I liked a few times, just to quickly preserve desired shape and scale relationships, before diving into the piece for real. But that's more like underpainting. Scanning a drawing in then working on top of it is a similar process, I guess.

But I don't do that much either, preferring to copy from a sketch by eyeballing it. The drawing usually becomes more and more refined this way: as you copy it over, you gain more confidence in the forms and lines, and more familiarity with the shape relationships, and mistakes become more apparent and can be fixed.

As I have said before when this discussion has come up, I think the most important aspect is to be honest about it. If you do trace, say so or people will consider you a cheat when they find out (and if you trace references from the internet, they're likely to find you out).

That said, there's a difference between an artist working on a light box and someone tracing photos or other poeple's artwork. Tracing your own work isn't simply an act of following a line slavishly: for one thing you had to create that line to begin with and for another, you usually don't have a clean outline until after the tracing, that is, you use the lightbox to clean up a sketch. When you trace somebody else's finished linework or a photo, you never have to think about why the line follows a certain route, why it bulges in one place or has a bit of a squiggle somewhere else. In short you don't have to think much and you learn very little. It's not illegal to trace (unless you're infringing on copyrights) but it's not much point, either.

Stipulating what you can and cannot do in art is snobbery and is something that I would like to see less of.

As to the merits and benifits of these methods however, I agree with Smolin and Voluspa, there is little new to be learned from tracing another person's lines. Still, if the objective is simply to understand how to handle a graphics tablet and stylus, as I was given to understand was the subject of this thread, it's somewhere to start.

By way of an example of what I am talking about I will explain a process I often use. Because I find it very difficult to create pretty female faces without reference I sometimes take a random pretty face (from the internet or some other scanned source) and trace the outline or silhouette. It's somewhere to start for me and from there I can make up whatever features I like.